How Can technology impact your digital content strategy? What are the trends you need to track to stay ahead of the content marketing curve? Gordy Cascasco, Associate Director of SEO, Huge, tells us more.

Content is central to the marketing strategy of Brands today – whether in the B2B space or the B2C space. Content is the way Brands communicate in the space, time and platform of choice of their customers and prospects. But how do brands leverage content marketing as a strategy to build purposeful brand relationships and meaningful brand experiences for their audiences? What is the line between credible content that is of value to a prospect or customer; and an advertisement dressed up as content? What are the key considerations for building a thoughtful and high-performance content strategy? Gordy Cascasco, Associate Director of SEO, at digital agency Huge, tells us more.

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Content strategy is central to marketing today – what are your top 3 thumb rules for developing content that can deliver ROI and sustain in an omnichannel world?

Take a data-driven approach: Using tools such as Google Adwords or SEMRush to assess content opportunity is paramount to a successful, search-focused, content strategy.

Look beyond keywords: Evaluate the SERP to decide if it’s worth trying to compete with top-ranking content; consider social data to evaluate trending content that might not yet have significant search volume.

Consider users first: Don’t just create content for search engines. If you want your content to have staying power, you need to deliver value to the people reading it, first and foremost.

How will AI transform content creation and consumption in the next decade?

Already, AI is shaping content creation in areas like weather, sports box scores, localized results, and simple news stories. The way we can receive near-live updates in Alexa’s “morning briefing” and Siri’s “Ask me anything” shows us the potential this service holds in the future of content creation. However, I think we are years (or even decades) away from true automation in creating long-form content. As well as this, the human voice will remain extremely important in keeping users engaged with content—and AI might have trouble shaking it’s robot-like style.

Social media is crucial to content marketing. How have you seen marketer’s approach to social media marketing evolve over the last few years?

Two of the most prominent trends I’ve seen in social media marketing involve increasing speed and informalizing tone. As it pertains to social, the age of the 24-hour news cycle is past us. Trends and opinions shift even FASTER now, and it is important to dedicate full-time resources to monitoring social opinion if companies want to be truly influential in this space. In the same vein, we have seen a tonal shift for many large brands to becoming more playful or comedic. This started with Wendy’s iconic Twitter account and is now being replicated by countless others.

What technology or user behavior trends; or innovations in content creation or distribution are you tracking into 2020?

The biggest trend I’m tracking as far as users are concerned is the shift of traffic away from the desktop and towards mobile, voice, and other connected devices such as Apple Watches. Nearly every innovative electronics company is moving towards creating smarter connected devices, and this will have the effect of splitting our time away from traditional digital mediums. I believe that by 2020 and beyond, our individual ecosystems of connected devices will have expanded to near-unrecognizable proportions. With this, marketers will have to shift their approach to strategy and reporting in order to continue driving traffic and revenue.

Interested in hearing more from Gordy and other Executives from LinkedIn, TripAdvisor, Google among others? Meet and hear them at the Content Marketing Summit , a part of the DATAx NY Festival.

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